Alternate Side is about the haves and have-nots and Manhattan, in fact, a small block of Manhattan.

The main character Nora is a rich NewYorker who lives downtown in a brownstone on a dead-end street. Nora begins to work in a jewelry museum, and her husband the clueless Charlie wants and gets a free parking spot near their place. Nora is good to others unlike most of their neighbors, but especially Charity her maid and Ricky, the neighborhood handyman. Their neighborhood is a tight-knit community where anyone’s business is everyone’s business, but the characters in this community watch out for one another, too.

When one of them, in an explosive anger, hurts Ricky, Nora finds herself annoyed with the community and her husband.

The conflict in the story is soft but this is New York, and the secondary characters supposedly reflect what Manhattanites are like, cold, selfish, and reserved. Not all characters are adequately or credibly drawn, however. The main character is intelligent, well-meaning, but imperfect as it takes her a long time to see things and people as they really are. Although she lives with her husband, Charity, their dog, and their two college-age kids coming and going at intervals, her marriage is not built on a solid foundation, which takes its toll by the end of the novel. Nora is a good worker and excels in doing her job.

The plot and the characters are skillfully constructed, and the story takes its name from the alternate-side parking rule that changes from day to day. Although Nora is the main character and the author does a good enough job of getting into her head, the real story is about the neighborhood, which has made me think that this neighborhood is the main character, where the brownstones belong to different wealthy families, their members indifferent to those who are less fortunate.

The point of view belongs to Nora and the story is about the life in the city and its upper class. The nuisance of city life and its anxieties are well captured by this author, but although I have lived in New York and have read other books by Anna Quindlen, I couldn’t fully warm up to this story.

Ricky's character.

some of the snooty people on the block

not go to NYC anymore .

is Anna Quindlen, a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared on several lists. She is the author of eight novels: Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings, Rise and Shine, Every Last One, Still Life with Bread Crumbs, and Miller’s Valley. Her New York Times column 'Public and Private' won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

I neither recommend nor not recommend this book. It is not very long, though, and is like a slice-of-life a la Manhattan upper-middle class to upper-class residents. The ending was satisfactory, however.

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Created Jul 13, 2018 at 6:35pm • Submit your own review...